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Tag: college basketball

As a fan of the Georgetown University Hoyas, I’ve been prettypessimistic about the state of college hoops over the last few years. In pursuit of the potentially huge bucks associated with college football, conferences have been realigning and schools without football have been left behind. And while some private universities have come out ahead in these gridiron games, private schools generally can’t compete with public institutions in football. They don’t have the state-subsidized scale needed to gather huge student bodies, nor do they “represent” their states, both of which help fill football stadiums and bring eyeballs to television sets. So I have feared doom for private schools left out of the “Power Five” conferences, especially those in the “new” Big East.

Maybe it has. While the revenue potential of college hoops is significantly smaller than it is for football, the costs are also much lower. There are far fewer players and coaches, the equipment is less costly, and you don’t need nearly as big a band. That means you don’t need as much TV money, or as many posteriors in seats, as you do for football. And if you don’t have football, as some Big East players recently pointed out, hoops is the school’s flagship sport, and the basketball players are the biggest campus stars. That may be a recruiting edge.

Or maybe Villanova’s championship is just long odds that played out, as opposed to a sign the odds are not that bad. Indeed, the Big East overall has struggled a bit in the Tourney since the conference’s reinvention three years ago. It was also lucky that it formed at the same time Fox Sports was putting together a new sports channel – FS1 – and needed programming to fill the hours. Fox offered the Big East a princely (for basketball) sum of about $4.2 million per school per year over a 12 year period. But so far the ratings have been pretty paltry: the first two conference championships had only about 702,000 and 414,000 viewers, respectively, and even though this year’s was on the full Fox network, it only attracted 1.4 million viewers. In contrast, this year’s Big Ten championship game drew 3.2 million eyeballs.

Though the NCAA still runs ads suggesting that college sports is all about students who happen to be athletes, big-time college football and basketball programs have basically given up the pretense of being about anything other than big bucks and big wins. See, for instance, the latest power play by the “BCS” football conferences.

That’s fine – better they be open about what drives them. Unfortunately, as I write in this SeeThruEdu post, the rest of higher ed is similarly self-interested. Problem is, it won’t admit it, and uses the notion that it’s all about the “common good” to get taxpayer money, often without producing any real benefit for the people paying the bills.

A couple of years ago I predicted it (though I was hardly the only one): Darwinian conference predation, driven by football and the quest for television markets and money, would kill the Big East, and at least seriously hamstring the small, basketball-centric private colleges that made up so much of it. Huge, flagship public universities would consolidate power in service of football, I and others foresaw, and relatively small schools like Georgetown, Villanova, and St. John’s – which could never produce enough alums to regularly fill even close to 80,000-seat football stadiums – would be orphaned.

But this isn’t the fault of Pitt and Syracuse, or even the ACC (though perhaps the ACC deserves scorn for its 2003 raid of the Big East, and Pitt for its possible duplicity about its move). No, ultimately it’s the fault of a higher education system that gives flagship state schools massive size advantages over private institutions both physically and in terms of enrollment. (Though all of higher ed, of course, is awash in taxpayer dough.) This advantage is primarily thanks to taxpayer subsidies, which underwrite the schools’ gigantic enrollments and, too often, their athletics programs directly. So the ACC was largely reacting to moves by what’s now the PAC-12, the so-called Big 10 (which also has twelve members), and the impending destruction of the Big 12 thanks to the inability of two behemoths – the University of Texas and Texas A&M – to get along.

Indeed, in the grand scheme of big-time college sports, the ACC is the most friendly of the emerging ”superconferences” to private schools; with the addition of Syracuse it will have five of them, the others being Duke, Wake Forest, Boston College, and the University of Miami. But it will almost certainly be considered the weakest of the superconferences in football, and if you look at the latest Sagarin ratings of the ACC schools, note the cellar-dwellers: Wake, Duke and Boston College.

This is depressing if you enjoy high-level, private school hoops. Of course, a few football-free private schools do enjoy regular success – Xavier, Gonzaga, and most recently Butler – but their resources are significantly smaller than the members of the current Bowl Championship Series conference schools, with lucrative BCS television contracts tied, first and foremost, to football. So with the likely demise of the Big East, the going is likely about to get much tougher for the likes of Seton Hall, Providence, and other Big East, hoops-only schools, even if they are able to hang on to relevance.

Is federal anti-trust action needed to deal with this, as some have suggested? I’m no anti-trust expert, but I’d say absolutely not. For one thing, when this has been threatened before it has had little to do with fair competition, and much to do with federal legislators trying to get the flagships in their states in on the BCS. That will do private schools little good, and hardly seems motivated by a real desire for fair competition or justice. We should also hope that Congress will focus on other, more important things, like, say, getting Washington back to its proper constitutional size. And most important, attacking the BCS will do little to address the fundamental problem: As long as states furnish huge subsidies to public universities, those institutions will always have a massive size advantage is the world of college sports.